Tom Phillips in Beijing
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Meet Nut Brother,the
Chinese activist-artist
attempting to vanquish toxic smog by sucking it up through a black plastic nozzle..
As the latest coal-fuelled “airpocalypse” engulfed northern China this week and world leaders gathered in Paris to debate the fight against climate change, Nut Brother hit the streets of Beijing hoping to raise awareness of his country’s deadly smog crisis.
For the last 100 days, the activist, whose real name is Wang Renzheng, has used the industrial appliance to extract dust and other lung-choking pollutants from the city’s atmosphere before transforming them into a dark brown “smog brick”.
“I want to show this absurdity to more people,” Wang, 34, said on Tuesday as pollution levels in the Chinese capital soared to levels 40 times higher than those deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.
“I want people to see that we cannot avoid or ignore this problem [and] that we must take real action.” He ordered a vacuum cleaner from a manufacturer in Shanghai and began taking it on four-hour sorties across Beijing’s urban sprawl, gobbling up pollutants as he went. Photographs published in the Chinese media this week showed him pushing his vacuum cleaner past some of Beijing’s most celebrated landmarks. One image shows him sucking up dust outside Rem Koolhaas’s cloud-puncturing China Central Television headquarters; in another he is seen strolling past the portrait of Mao Zedong at the entrance to the Forbidden City.Nut Brother said his attempts to suck up smog from Tiananmen Square – perhaps the most heavily guarded public space on earth – had triggered his only brush with the law. “They sent a plainclothes policeman to follow me but they didn’t impede my movements,” he recalled. Chinese websites and social networks were covered with reports of the artist’s quirky smog-harvesting campaign on Tuesday in Beijing. Reporters flocked to the artist’s temporary home – a 60-yuan-a-night youth hostel near the Lama Temple – to see his vacuum cleaner up close.
“It is terrible today,” he complained of the latest bout of severe pollution, Beijing’s worst of the year. Despite grabbing headlines this week, China’s unconventional environmentalist remains a relative enigma. “I’m passionate about the environment but I don’t know if that qualifies me as an activist,” he said when asked how he defined himself. “I think I’m a normal person, just like anyone else.”
In a 2012 interview with the Shenzhen Daily, Nut Brother said his “spiritual idol” was Subcomandante Marcos, the essay-writing, rifle-toting leader of Mexico’s Zapatista rebel group. On Tuesday, the artist conceded it would take more than one vacuum cleaner to purify China’s skies. But he said he hoped to bring some of the Zapatista leader’s creativity to one of his homeland’s most pressing problems. “[Subcomandante Marcos] used imaginative ways to change society,” Nut Brother said. “That is the path I want to follow.” 
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